ANNISTON, Alabama -- Ellis Johnson has seen a lot of SEC football over the years.

Seventeen seasons in all, beginning with his first stint at Alabama from 1990 to 1993, enough time in the conference to see the league change and shift into the nation's most powerful.

Being in the SEC that long has convinced Johnson that the only way to preserve the traditional rivalries in the league and come up with a way to make sense is to push the SEC schedule to nine games, a somewhat unpopular view among the conference's head coaches, including Auburn coach Gus Malzahn.

"I'm certainly not one of the coaches that will have any input, if coaches do, but I've always thought the ninth game made more sense," Johnson said. "I was in the SEC when they first started the East-West, and we had one permanent, and two rotators, or two permanent, but it worked better."

Expansion changed the league drastically when Missouri and Texas A&M were added, forcing the SEC to place Missouri in the East, a bit of geographical confusion that left Johnson puzzled, too.

"What you're getting into now, is you've got Missouri in the east, which makes no sense at all," Johnson said. "I can't imagine what Missouri is spending, sending their volleyball team and track team all over the place. I don't know how they do it."

The two permanent rivalries with the kind of history fans hate to lose are Auburn-Georgia and Alabama-Tennessee, two rivalries Johnson knows well. Nine of his 17 seasons in the SEC have been spent in the state of Alabama.

Opponents of the nine-game schedule have cited several factors in favor of the eight, including the possibility that an extra game on the SEC's grinder could hurt the league's national title chances, that teams would no longer schedule premier out-of-conference opponents and that some great non-conference rivalries, like South Carolina-Clemson and Georgia-Georgia Tech, could be lost.

"Does it make it harder?" Johnson said. "You're dad-gum right, because I think we're the best conference in America, and when you've got to play nine of them instead of eight of them, it's simple math. ... it does cut out on some of the regional and national-flavored scheduling, there's some negatives to it."

But in an era of expansion, Johnson thinks a nine-game conference slate upholds the league's tradition best.

The SEC is expected to make a decision on the schedule sometime in the next month. Slive said the league would have an answer before the league's annual spring meetings in Destin at the end of May.

"I think the only way you're going to keep natural rivals able to play each other, and also have good balance, and put these things back to a logical reason with matchups," Johnson said. "To me it only makes sense."